In the United States, the borderline obsessive academic focus with judicial independence as a political science concept would lead one to believe that judicial independence as an empirical political reality is persistently endangered. And yet, periodic partisan apoplexy about controversial Supreme Court decisions notwithstanding, it is anything but: Even with judicial potency in polities as disparate as Israel, India, and Germany, the American judiciary remains perhaps the most powerful and most stable in the world. But with all due respect to John Locke, all the world is emphatically not America. Elsewhere, of course, there are locales where the climate surrounding law and courts is rather different, where judicial independence is inconsistent, threatened, or downright fictitious. It is in the study of these nations that judicial independence deserves the central place in public law scholarship it already occupies in America. And with the publication of Maria Popova's Politicized Justice in Emerging Democracies, students of at least two sets of those nations—post-Soviet states specifically and emerging democracies more generally—have both a clarion call for what they could be studying and a first-rate example of how they could be studying it.